


Till Touchdown Brings Me Round Again

by halotolerant



Category: Life on Mars (UK)
Genre: Coma, M/M, Sam is from 2006
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-12
Updated: 2011-08-12
Packaged: 2017-10-22 13:36:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/238606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One day in 2006, DCI Sam Tyler is run down by a car and sent into a coma from which he may never recover, and for the man who finds him - Traffic policeman DS Gene Hunt - things may also never be the same again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Till Touchdown Brings Me Round Again

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you elfwhistletree for beta and Fern Tree for the truly gorgeous artwork!

**Chapter One**

\- - -

It came within inches of ending before it started.

\- - -

Late one night in central Manchester, a tired, drunk, middle-aged man had found himself lying on his upstairs landing, on carpet that hadn’t been vacuumed in the eight months since his wife had left, and looking up through the skylight at where there should have been stars, had the sky not been choked with street lights.

Millions of rocks, hurtling through space, through vast, meaningless space – the Universe, he thought idly, was a serious heck of a long way to fall - and he wondered why some immense, thoughtless asteroid didn’t come down right there and then and wipe the whole damn mess clean away. After all, it nearly happened all the time - if you believed the papers - disaster diverting by merest thousands of miles, by inter-galactic inches.

 _What makes a pile of dust become a planet, gather an atmosphere, a slimy film of life, the concept of legs and eyes and finally someone clutching an empty bottle of Jack Daniels, too hot in a half-nylon blend shirt, staring blurry-eyed at eternity and seeing nothing?_

Millions, billions of things that might happen, that could, that maybe should, that hadn’t, that don’t.

Half a millimetre – less – here or there, and everything is different. Except that it isn’t, it all turns out exactly how it does.

But looking for reasons is what humans do, and those that are especially fond of it become police officers, only it turns out that - whether you’ve got the methodology of Sherlock Holmes or Scooby Doo - reasons seem to remain pretty much impossible to find.

Which is why we never know quite what’s going to happen next, for all that this man, spinning at last out of the hold of consciousness through sheer weight of alcohol, had no hope of anything changing at all.

\- - -

Detective Sergeant Gene Hunt woke up bleary-eyed and furry-tongued, still wearing most of his clothes, still sprawled on the landing floor, desperate for a piss, already fifteen minutes late for work, alarm-clock blaring from his bedroom like a siren hunting him down.

Not a normal weekday morning – he hadn’t let things get that bad, though avoiding the reflection of the bathroom light in the shaving mirror was something he was slowly becoming skilled at.

He’d forgotten yet again to buy cereal or bread – over the last few years Rachel had taken to ordering groceries online. When she’d left, so had the computer and any ongoing awareness of the state of cupboards. The leftover bits of last night’s takeaway – or was it the night before? – would give him biting heartburn by mid-morning but something had to soak up the last of the booze.

Since the garage near the Police Station sold instant coffee he never ran out of it, and with two cups down he felt the spark of life return to his aching head; Adam receiving the touch of God.

 _Were his reactions all they should have been, by the time he got to work and into uniform and finally into the patrol car?_

There are some questions for which there is never any bloody hope of an answer, but we ask them anyway, because believing an answer exists is maybe the closest we can get to finding it. Gene would have ample opportunity to interrogate himself afterwards, but the way things turned out, luck or fate or the god that was caffeine was with him – or maybe he really _had been_ fine, maybe his blithe judgement of himself as fit to drive had been correct.

That day, in a few hours time, a man called DCI Sam Tyler was going to be run down by a car, left lying in the middle of the road. When Gene drove past, minutes later, he didn’t kill the man, didn’t hit his head with the nearside wheel of his Audi, didn’t end it once and for all, only almost, only nearly.

Only inches away.

\- - -

That’s the thing about it that he didn’t tell anyone, not even those first heart-pounding moments after he’d found Tyler, radioing for an ambulance – _no listen, he’s just lying in the road, he’s not opening his eyes, get them here now_ – he never mentioned that he almost hadn’t seen him down there in the path of the wheels of his patrol car, that he’d been leaning down behind the dashboard to find another fag.

These days you aren’t allowed to smoke in police cars. Gene does.

He hears the news zig-zag its way through the radio channels – _officer down Lime Road... Tyler... Lime Road.... DCI Tyler... found by an officer in Traffic.... Sam Tyler..._ – and in the background some music coming out of Tyler’s car.

 _David fucking Bowie, let’s play a game shall we, inappropriate music to play over a wounded man, that might just about win._

One of the many, many reasons why Gene hates working in the Traffic Division is that the fatalities and injuries are just about the most mundane, predictable and depressing possible. After all, about the single most dangerous thing someone is likely to unwittingly do to themselves is get in a car.

 _So why the fuck shouldn’t he be allowed to smoke in one?_

You did get some guys with the rulebook actually honest-to-god memorised line by line, driven by an evangelical need to solve the problems of the world by enforcing the seatbelt laws and wearing day-glo orange tabards, and then there were the few who’d basically realised that with a little luck and connivance it could mean a cushy little number, sitting in a soft car seat.

And then of course, some guys had been put there.

Gene was put there, quite definitively _. Consider yourself lucky to still have a job, consider yourself lucky to have rank, and Hunt, there are women in the Service remember – please don’t call it the Force – so less of the ‘guys’, eh?_

Funny, the kind of mental debris that floats about, something to cling to when you don’t want to think about what’s happening, don’t want to see what’s in front of you – _the ambulance still isn’t here, is it taking a fucking detour via Liverpool?_

He’s sitting on the ground by Tyler’s head, and Tyler is breathing and has a pulse, and the blood isn’t much and all from what looks like a shallow head wound. The coffee and the stale poppadoms in Gene’s stomach are staging a rebellion and his skull aches as if he was the one that was bleeding onto the pavement and his tongue fucking canes where he bit it as he slammed the brakes on.

Distraction again – easier to look into himself than at Tyler, and that’s saying something.

“Tyler,” he says, near the man’s ear. “Can you hear me? My name’s Gene Hunt. DS Hunt out of Traffic, we were at the same frigging namby-pamby Tactical Driving Course last year, do you remember? Can you hear me? Can you squeeze my fingers? Tyler? Tyler, can you blink? Fuck.”

He feels like an absolute idiot but when the paramedics do finally show up, they run through all the same stuff, only they talk much more loudly and with much less desperation. But then they don’t have to keep thinking that they almost fucking cracked this man’s skull like an egg because they couldn’t wait five minutes for the next non-Health-and-Safety-approved Benson & Hedges.

\- - -

“Did you see the vehicle involved in the collision?” Chief Inspector Young asks Gene at the roadside, within the circus ring of flashing lights and high-visibility jackets and scene-of-the-crime tape. “We’re assuming it was car versus pedestrian, correct?”

“Paramedics found injuries consistent with that and Traffic reckons so - we’re awaiting confirmation from forensics,” some other Sergeant pipes up from behind his notebook. “I’ve arranged to get the CCTV reviewed.”

“Why the hell was Tyler’s jeep stopped anyway? Why was he in the road?”

There are some questions in life that never get a satisfactory answer, but that doesn’t stop anyone sodding well asking them.

“Please may I be added to the team on the case, sir?” This was also probably in that group of questions, but anyway Gene heard himself ask it.

“ _You_ want to...? Which case, DS Hunt?”

“Tyler’s case, sir.” Breathing deeply so as not to tell his Chief Inspector that he’s a brainless idiot with more diplomas in applied computing than sense. The Chief is a tall, strong man run to fat, who seems to think wearing purple and pink striped silk shirts will make him look younger and who gels his hair to the point where it looks permanently wet – Gene tends to feel tired of him before he even starts speaking.

“The case _of_ Tyler or the case Tyler was working on? Anyway, I can’t see how that would be consistent with protocol.” The Chief Inspector gives him one look, one clear up-and-down look with an expression like he can smell not just last night but every night’s drink oozing from his pores.

But this isn’t him – this wasn’t him, at least.

Gene and the Chief were actually cadets together once, a million years ago, and the Chief ought to remember it, because back then he was the skinny kid who stammered and blushed when he was sent to ask a WPC to get coffee and Gene was the golden boy, the best damn officer on the force, the one who was going to go far, the one even the local underworld were starting to know the name of.

“I found him, sir, I...” He wants to say: _I picked him up, he’s mine like a bird fallen out of a tree_ , but it’s not an emotion he understands in himself and it’ll sound even more stupid vocalised.

What time is it? Way past lunchtime and he hasn’t eaten since the poppadoms, maybe he needs something - he feels like he’s floating.

“You should probably take the rest of this shift as emergency personal leave, Sergeant Hunt,” someone says gently, pulling him aside. Apparently there’s a form for that. When he started in the Force, when it _was_ ‘the Force’, it was 1983 and if the day was disturbing you took everyone down the pub and bought a round and tasked whoever was newest with staying to answer the phone.

Mobiles now, they let anyone who wants you track you down anywhere. Gene’s almost never rings.

\- - -

 _Why do people put flowers at the site of accidents?_

Gene, standing leaning back against his car, smoking, contemplates the area of tarmac where Tyler lay as it is now, two days after the event, clear of tape and technicians. One solitary bunch of roses is getting raindrops on its cellophane. There’s no card.

Tyler had been on his side, just there, one arm outstretched – the position looked unsettlingly uncomfortable. His eyes had fallen open when Gene tried to shake him, sightless as a doll.

It’s not like Gene really knows him – Gene’s circled round this thought a lot the past forty-eight hours, along with the image of Tyler’s sightless eyes and a starkly intense recollection of the smell of fabric softener in his suit jacket, though he can’t remember registering it at the time. Gene doesn’t know where Tyler lives or how he likes his coffee or whether he supports City or United or what kind of no doubt inane and politically-correct hobbies he gets up to.

Before the Tactical Driving day, in fact, although he’d been inescapably aware of Tyler’s existence he’d actually only occasionally seen him, usually passing in a corridor or as a photo in a Newsletter. And then after that stupid bloody course and all that happened on it, burning with anger and hoping for something poisonous, he’d asked some other officers about the man and been told only that the Department’s youngest DCI had a reputation for getting personally involved in cases and forcing a lot of unpaid overtime on his team with a religious zeal. Just as Gene had been relishing this information, the officer had gone on to explain that since Tyler seemed to wind up nailing most of his cases apparently through sheer power of dedication, his slave-driving tendencies were only sporadically resented.

As with just about any senior figure, there were rumours about Tyler’s private life, but honestly – the officer talking to Gene had said with a laugh – no one could figure out how he’d have the time.

“Wasn’t that your job, Gene?” the officer – PC Timms, a man with the IQ of a shop-soiled lettuce  - had said, afterwards, foolishly. “Tyler’s, I mean. Wasn’t that your job before..?”

Some kind colleague had shut him up with a well placed elbow to the ribs before Gene had had to tell him precisely what he thought of that question, and Gene had just about managed to get himself out of the canteen without breaking any objects or people.

If, at that moment, he’d run into Tyler again, he would have punched him square in the face, no question.

Now, Gene crushes a cigarette butt violently under his heel and thinks, _Fuck it, just see that he’s alive, see that he’s nothing to do with you, and then stop bloody thinking about it._

\- - -

 **Chapter Two**

\- - -

“I could knock you down one hand behind my back!” he’d yelled at Tyler, during a session of ‘Tactical Driving: Part Two’ back in September 2005 when some idiot instructor, with a class of fourteen to work with, had, of all the police officers in all the world, paired the two of them up.

 _What really happened between them, that day?_

Sometimes Gene isn’t entirely as sure as he’d like to be, but it ended clear enough with him yelling and fire lighting in Tyler’s eyes as he’d scrambled to get at Gene in return, until they’d had to be pulled apart like wankered Saturday night yobs in an all-night kebab shop.

 “He’s proper,” was one of the things Timms had said to Gene, during that conversation afterwards. “Doesn’t like roughhouse, does it by the book, no feelings, talks about ‘negotiation’ if you try and argue with him. So I don’t know what the fuck happened, you must have really got under his skin.”

\- - -

When Gene gets to St James’ Hospital on Saturday afternoon, he finds Tyler’s been moved from the HDU where he was first taken to a side-room on a neurosurgical ward.

The Sister – or Ward Manager, as you’re supposed to call them now - lets him in through the electronically locked entrance and escorts him down a long corridor of doors which is like something out of the bleeding _X-Files,_ until eventually they reach the one with _Tyler, Sam (Dr Lee, Nil By Mouth, Hourly Burette)_ written on the wipe-clean nameplate.

It smells strange in the room – enriched foam soap, Gene will learn later, from daily bed-baths, gentle on a bruised body getting yet more damaged just by doing nothing - and Tyler is very pale and still and small-looking, under a thin blue blanket, connected to various tubes like his body needs tethering to the earth not to just float away.

Any grasp Gene had on why he’s bloody well driven all the way here disappears the instant he steps through the door – what the hell did he think was going to come of it? This skinny bloke who might barely remember Gene’s name even before all this is in a fucking coma, and Gene is standing next to him still in his coat, rubbing alcohol gel into his hands until all the chapped skin round his cuticles stings.

He sits down facing away from the bed and texts Ray about some drinks next week – walking straight back past the nurse having only that instant arrived is, for some reason, more than he feels equal to.

Tyler keeps breathing, a small up and down movement of the blanket just out of the corner of Gene’s eye.

He can’t help noticing, and then - after he’s left - remembering, that for some reason they’ve taped Tyler’s eyelids shut. Gene assumes they’d know to remove them should he want to suddenly wake up, but the image makes his stomach turn over.

As he leaves, having timed fifteen minutes on his mobile for what felt like several days and played so many games of ‘Snake’ his eyes have crossed, he sees the nurse sitting at a wide desk reading a lurid, cheap-print magazine titled ‘Real Stories’ and absently eating a giant tin of Roses with a couple of colleagues, all neat hair and blue uniforms, attractive, most of them. Gene wonders absently if any of them ever dress up as nurses on nights out – the fake red-and-white-and-suspenders kind that are supposed for some reason to be sexy.

“Visiting’s two till six weekdays,” she calls out as he passes. He wonders who she thinks he is.

\- - -

Gene Hunt was born in 1965 in Lichfield, youngest of three. His Dad moved them all to Manchester after his mother died, which happened when Gene was born so as far as Gene’s concerned it’s always been Manchester. Forget about his childhood – he tries to – he joined the Police as a teenager when it was still the Force and then something like life began.

There was a pretty and kind young woman working in a café where he took to stopping for lunch on his beat. She was called Rachel and he married her and bought a house with two spare bedrooms.

He would have been prepared to go to a specialist, undergo whatever necessary embarrassing tests, to find out why no children had come along. He’d told her so. A few weeks later he’d found her contraceptive pills in a box of old photos under the bed. Never, even when they were shouting at each other, did he feel he’d understood how she felt or what her reasons were.

Now Rachel lives in London and has an internet business selling customised embroidery patterns, she has two goldfish and apparently is learning Polish in evening classes. She calls very occasionally to remind him about how and when to pay the utility bills – polite, distant, hard to decipher – and sometimes it feels like more conversation than they ever had when they were married.

Whatever was wrong between them, Gene doesn’t think more money or less frustration on his part would have changed any of it much, but he wonders sometimes what might have happened if he hadn’t been assigned the Carruthers case - _getting on for ten years ago now, god, where did the time go?_ \- with the suspect who wouldn’t say where he’d buried the body of a little girl, a rodent of a man who frankly wasn’t worth shit and was clearly going to get beaten up by somebody sooner or later anyway, the lip he had on him. Gene had done worse before and got away with it, and on this occasion did at least keep his job – the powers that be understood, and it still wasn’t OK to do down your own kind – but by then it was the nineties and there was paperwork to do and targets to meet and press to respond to and suddenly he wasn’t in CID any more, and his job got given to his DI and then, when she went on maternity leave, to a short-arse twat called Sam Tyler.

\- - -

“You’d knowingly endanger the lives of members of the public?” Tyler had asked again, disgust in his face, twisted round on the stupid wooden kiddie seats the instructor had made the Driving Course class sit in.

Gene was two rows back and slightly to the left of him, hunched into his coat with dislike of the early hour, the cold classroom and the lack of caffeine.

“I wouldn’t let a man I knew had killed someone get away in front of me bleeding eyes just because I wasn’t cleared to drive on the frigging kerb.”

“No, you wouldn’t _know_ he’d killed, you don’t get to decide who’s killed. You just have suspects – you’re the policeman, not the judge, remember?”

Gene, arms folded, stomach grumbling, had looked the man square in the eye, just about at the end of his tether. “You seriously telling me that’s how you think in the field, cold as a calculator?”

Holding his gaze in a way few could, Tyler’s eyes had narrowed. “It’s how I ought to think. How you ought to think. Otherwise, DS Hunt, you _will_ know a killer because it’ll be you.”

Arrogant as hell, idiotic as fuck, and yet it had blazed from him, from that twat Tyler, that belief, that fire, that force of life that by then Gene had long forgotten, coming up against him and challenging him to meet it.

\- - -

Gene spends Saturday night on the sofa trying to push aside his thoughts with a six-pack of Carling Export and some obscure replay on Sky Sports. He’s woken at 3am by a burning pain in the centre of his chest which eases a little after he’s sick. If the fucking GP was ever open at a time he could get to it, he’d go, he reasons, and downs a handful of Gaviscon tablets ( _thank god the garage sells them_ ) and goes back to sleep.

On Sunday, Tyler’s on the twelve o’clock news headlines, which is about the first thing Gene hears. He turns off the TV and stretches and surveys his living room. Things seem to be bearing down on him now with almost palpable pressure and he feels a sudden, strong, almost desperate urge to clear up, to dig himself out. He wanders around emptying the ash trays, then starts picking up abandoned shirts and socks and takeaway boxes and even wipes the coffee table before stuffing a load in the washing machine, having a shower and taking himself down the local pub for a roast dinner and then the quiz – Ray turns up and a bunch of the others from work.

Despite the beer and the laughter and the lads around him, Gene can’t seem to clear his mind of the image of the tape on Tyler’s eyelids. The memory has twisted – maybe some dream combined things overnight – until he sees Tyler lunging at him, that day on the course, with his eyes taped shut instead of open and fierce and blazing at him.

All of which suggests he really shouldn’t visit Tyler again.

It’s not like Tyler would even know he was there, like Tyler could have in any way taken in that Gene had had anything to do with him these last few weeks, like it could in any way have mattered.

Maybe Tyler never even thinks about him.

\- - -

The following week Gene gives out eighteen tickets to unlicensed drivers, another seven or so for no insurance, spends an entire day on the bypass with the speed gun and then on Thursday finally gets to chase some car thieves with blues and twos. All four look to be about twelve years old and run away into an estate but he’s faster than they’re expecting and their sportswear is not purchased in view of hours down the local _Fitness First._

“Fat fucking police git,” the one under his knee manages, gasping for breath.

“Sore loser, are we?” Gene mutters, smiling in the fresh air, surrounded by straggling grass, used needles and the dumped Tesco trolleys, with the line of smoking mums with the babies in the pink frilly buggies just watching him.

Back in the squad car, waiting for a backup van to get the suspects to the nick for processing, he looks up the precise details of the wreck of a vehicle he’s just recovered on the Police National Database.

 _Car: Ford Cavalier. Registration: E599 SRJ. Colour: Blue. Wanted in connection to suspected dangerous driving, leaving the scene of an accident. April 12 th 2006, Manchester_

The date he notices at once and two calls to the station for a computer check confirm his first suspicions.

Sitting in his driver’s seat, sweaty from the chase, two handcuffed boys in the back muttering abuse at him, Gene rests his forehead on the steering wheel and groans.

He’s only just gone and found the car that ran down Tyler.

\- - -

“Nice weather we’ve been having,” the same nurse as last time says, leading him to Tyler’s room.

“I bet you say that to all the visitors.”

“Not when it’s raining.” She smiles and walks away – grey eyes and curly brown hair and a nice chest that Gene can’t help but notice, helpfully aided in disguising his gaze by reading her name badge: _Annie Cartwright._

The visitor chairs are padded and wipe-clean. Thinking of the all the legitimate people who must have sat in them – Tyler’s parents, girlfriend maybe, brothers or sisters, people with a real connection to him - Gene pulls one up to the bed.

“Tyler, my name’s Gene Hunt.” He feels like an idiot, stops, breathes, stifles a sense of déjà vu. “We met doing the Tactical Driving thing.”

Probably the less said about that the better. He’s wondered before if Tyler would remember it, if his mere presence would make Tyler wake up and yell at him again, revitalised with righteous anger.

“And then we met again after the accident. I mean...  Someone ran you down in the middle of the road and I found you. Would be nice and easy if you could tell me who they were, of course, but you’re no bleeding use for that, are you?”

He still feels like an idiot. Tyler’s eyes aren’t taped any more but there’s a layer of Vaseline over the lashes, and underneath the thin lids pupils move occasionally, randomly, as if the man’s only asleep.

 _What magical, mystical thing makes you able to wake up from a dream? Why do we trust that when we drift away, we’ll be able to crawl back again?_

“Tyler,” Gene says again. “I don’t know if you can hear me, but I’m working on it. I’m...”

Tyler lies still, breathing. There are fewer tubes attached to him now – all Gene can see is the one leading into his nose, taped down, and attached to a brightly coloured plastic bag labelled _Nutrison_ disgorging brown goo.

“Any coffee or tea?” an auxiliary nurse asks brightly, propping open the door with her foot.

“Ta, love,” he says, grateful for the distraction.

The tea is bitter, brown and small in volume but at least the milk is real.

“I’ve got biscuits too – Hovis Wholegrain or shortbread?”

She’s pretty – probably about nineteen, small and smiling with carefully painted bee-sting lips that give her an expression of gentle astonishment. “Nothing fancy then?” Gene teases her. “No garibaldis or pink wafers?”

“You want to go to BUPA for that, love.” She smiles – the bright purple lipstick clashes wonderfully with her green striped uniform. “Your brother, is he?”

“We work together,” Gene tells her, which is more or less a lie but seems to suffice – she makes a grimace of cheerful sympathy and withdraws.

Gene’s almost finished the tea, glad to have something to occupy him, to keep his mouth closed, when suddenly Tyler moves.

It’s barely anything, probably a reflex – he flings one arm over himself, looking to be aiming for his nasal tube and groans, a horrible primal sound of distress.

 _He’s alive!_ Gene feels like calling out, like a character in a Hammer Horror B-movie, except that’s how it feels, extraordinary, miraculous, exhilarating. His heart is beating fit for both of them as he presses the nurse-call buzzer, half-expecting Tyler’s eyes to open now, see him sitting there and flare into life...

The nurse called Annie comes into the room, frowns at the sight of Tyler’s flailing hand and reaches for a bunch of keys in her pocket, then unlocks a cabinet by the bed and gets out some vials, a needle and syringe.

“Should you be sedating him if you want him to wake up?” Gene can’t help asking; noticing the label; _midazolam_ – what they’d given his Dad at the end; not that by that stage the man had been capable of noticing being alive.

She looks up, wide eyes calm, patient. “Maybe it would be best if you leave,” she says gently. Then, turning her attention to her patient, her voice soothing and practiced, she takes his hand with one of her own, the other holding the needle poised in the air: “Now Sam, calm down, it’s alright, it’s all alright Sam, you’re safe here...”

Gene pulls the door closed behind him; his fingers have gone cold, his stomach tight, gooseflesh on his back like someone walking on a grave.

\- - -

 **Chapter Three**

\- - -

Gene’s aching stomach demands a drive-through MacDonalds on the way home from the hospital, although the way his hands still smell like alcohol gel disconcerts him as he eats the chips one-handed as he steers.

On the backseat are the stack of files he’s really not supposed to have removed from central records about the case Tyler was working on the day he was run down, which he’s been told is still more or less in limbo, since apparently the other senior investigative officer assigned to it has now also taken some of this fabled ‘personal leave’.

It’s late now, the street lights coming on and the drug-dealers congregating in the alley-ways like shy nocturnal creatures in a hedgerow. In a city, crime is everywhere, and Gene likes that, because you never let your guard down, you never stop suspecting everyone and mistrusting everything. You meet people from the other side of an invisible blue line that puts you in charge, stops you feeling for them. You draw back into yourself and prepare, ready to pounce, ready to win.

He was a winner once, he was the best. He has a nose for crime, a sixth sense for patterns in all that darkness, for the meaning and logic in the void, and now for the first time in years he feels those threads in his mind again, that yearning to solve a case, that need to force justice into an amoral universe. And when his mind drifts, buoyed on that feeling, it homes back inescapably to Tyler, again and again.

\- - -

On his sofa, in the light of a single lamp, files strewn around, packet of biscuits and a strong coffee to hand, Gene reads about dead women.

Sees the photos too.

Gene’s worked for decades, he’s seen some horrible stuff in his time, but this is genuinely nasty.

It seems Tyler was closing in on a killer with all the personal qualities of a Great White Shark; Gene’s prepared to bet the entire current contents of his drinks cupboard that what ended up happening to him was not utterly unconnected.

Grabbing a pad of paper, he starts making of a list of names, dates and references that need further investigation and at the top of the page he circles the first person he’s going to have to talk to.

\- - -

“So it was the right car but an unconnected driver?”

DI Roy – ‘call me Maya’ - is looking at Gene with fixed concentration. She’s sitting on the edge of her desk, here in the land of cubicles that is CID where you get a personal computer and buckets of free pens stamped with stop-smoking web addresses and nothing smells of piss. It’s late on Friday and even the overworked detectives have mostly gone home, but the office is bathed in fluorescent light.

Gene, standing in front of her, shakes his head. He’s been on the phone all day, trying angles, hurrying lab techs, annoying archivists at the database. He feels tremendously awake, even though he barely had time for coffee all day and missed his lunchtime fag.

“I stopped them initially,” he explains, “because they matched the description of perpetrators involved in the theft of a Mercedes last week. They confessed to that and to nicking the Ford from a Sainsbury’s car park four days after Sam got run down, apparently it had been left unlocked with the keys in the ignition.”

She shakes her head, already understanding: “And now all the prints in it are theirs?”

“Precisely. Of the few hundred or so specimens Forensics have found – we’ll never test all of them, it’s been around since the 90s, several owners - we’ve got their fingerprints, hundreds of others, traces of spit, semen, blood and piss. Oh, and three bags of herbal cannabis belonging to the arrested boys and traces of amphetamines which they deny having anything to do with. The database has it registered to a Mrs Whiteside in Stoke but she was deceased two years ago, her son lives in America and has no idea what may or may not have happened to it.”

He’s rehearsed this speech on the phone so very many times today – his ear is aching with the pressure of the receiver, holding it close in eagerness to hear something useful.

Roy nods grimly, biting her lip. “I take it someone’s reviewing all the car park CCTV since the date of the collision with Sam?”

“The camera was busted by local youths throwing stones on the 10th, the manager of the supermarket didn’t bother to get it fixed for a while and when the tapes start it’s already there.” Gene has managed now to get to the point of being able to restrain himself from kicking the nearest inanimate object in frustration whenever he remembers this.

Roy sighs – she has the look of someone growing immune to bad news. “I don’t know if anyone’s told you yet that Sam thought I’d been taken by a suspect in the case we were working on,” she says quietly. Another woman would be hugging her arms around her chest, but she is keeping her hands neatly folded in front of her and stares forward at him.

It wasn’t until he managed to get time to see her today that some other Sergeant had remarked ‘ _yeah, she’d be interested in Tyler, they were dating, people said they were going to move in together.’_

He couldn’t process it then, and now he’s having even more trouble, struggling to imagine this woman with scrawny, proper, flammable Tyler.

It hasn’t passed him by that people have started to talk about Tyler as if he’s already dead, and in the last half hour he’s noticed even Roy slipping into it now and again. He wonders how she feels when she goes to see him, whether having been intimate with Tyler makes it harder or easier to see his body like a fish on a slab.

 _Does Tyler react, when Maya Roy talks to him?_

He shakes his head, trying to clear it, and waits for more, intrigued.

“We’d interviewed a suspect,” Roy is continuing. “It was... well, anyway, I was following him after he left, phoned Sam to say that I was – he told me not to, of course – and then my battery died, of all the stupid things.”She closes her eyes in frustration. “And then to crown it all, I ran into some kids mucking about pretending to be gangsters in a playground on the Satchmore Road. One of them was bleeding, I didn’t have anything but my shirt to give him, I had to take another one to Casualty. And Sam gets the wrong end of the stick, apparently finds my shirt and... I just keep wondering, if he hadn’t seen that...”

Shaking her head, she rouses herself, standing up. “It’s stupid to think there’s more to it than a simple hit and run, but you want a reason – when someone’s hurt you always want a reason.”

“Have they given you any word on Tyler’s chances for now?” Gene hears himself asking. He’s never managed to ask at the hospital himself – he’s afraid of being asked what business it is of his, or who he is, or perhaps simply of the answer.

She stiffens, almost imperceptibly; whether at his use of the surname or that he asks at all he isn’t sure. Then, frown passing, “Oh yes, you found him, didn’t you? He’s just the same, which apparently isn’t necessarily a bad or a good thing. Not recognising anyone. But the doctor says it’s definitely a coma, not a vegetative state – they’ve done some kind of brain scan, saw a lot of activity.”

Gene’s lost, and it obviously shows.

“He could still wake up,” she explains, making a passable attempt at smiling brightly. “He’s still in there somewhere.”

She stands up, picking up a folder, interview over. “Excellent work all round, DS Hunt.”

\- - -

 **Chapter Four**

\- - -

Gene Hunt had a brother called Stuart, who - one summer when he was thirteen and Gene was ten - rescued a young bird which had fallen into their back yard from a very ill-advised nest on a telephone pole.

It wasn’t dead, but wouldn’t fly, only hop around the shoebox they put it in. They were encouraged when it drank water from an eggcup and stabbed at the woodlice Gene retrieved from cracks in the yard wall, going back and back for more even though it was getting darker and they wanted to be in bed before their Dad got home.

In the morning, running down the stairs in his socks, Gene found the cat in the kitchen leaning over the box, licking its lips. At the table, smoking a fag and still in a boozy cocoon of happiness, their father had been sitting, watching and laughing.

“And... I don’t even know why I’m telling you all this,” Gene says, stopping the story, trying to shake the feeling of pressure in his chest. Yesterday was another long, intense day at the files and records, trying to chase back the Cavalier through low-rent personal sales ads in the local paper and he finished too late to reach the hospital. Today it’s Saturday again and although he has every intention of carrying on working, no one expects him at the station.

He’s sitting by Tyler’s bed, and he can’t remember exactly what he began trying to explain that ended up bringing out all that crap.

Tyler’s very still today, eyes not even moving, and Gene has to concentrate to see the reassuring sign of his chest rising and falling.

Tyler is by some definition alive, no doubt about it, breathing on his own, but there can’t be any way he can hear anything, not that deep under – he doesn’t respond to voice, to touch, even when the nurses shake him and shine a light in his eyes as they do every four hours on what they tell Gene are necessary neuro observations.

Telling Sam Tyler is like telling the void – nothing will come back from it.

As always, when he thinks about Stuart, something turns over and hurts deep inside Gene’s chest. He’d never told Rachel about Stuart, there’d never been what felt like the right time, he’d never really thought she’d want to know, and he’d never been able to stand the thought of questions.

But Tyler is a million miles away inside his own head, might as well be on another planet, and simply bringing the words out into nothingness likes this feels like bringing the acid out of his chest.

Gene sighs.

“The thing about Stuart was,” he says slowly, twisting and untwisting his fingers as he speaks, “that he got into drugs. And I didn’t notice until it was too late.”

\- - -

Outside the hospital, spring is moving forwards in a wave of green and fecund proliferation, and of course the sun is fucking shining brighter than it was last week, but although the fact has no meaning it remains the truth, and Gene winds down his car window, enjoying the heat and the scent of cut grass.

Although it’s probably in truth not much healthier than the takeaways, Gene feels almost a glow of pride as he buys a selection of ready meals at the garage to stack in his freezer. He stands for a while, contemplating the anaemic collection of flowers in black plastic buckets, before telling himself he’s an idiot and grabbing Auto Trader on the way to the till. At the counter there are sweets and cigarettes and painkillers – impulse buys and he takes one packet of each.

While he’s been out, Rachel has phoned and left a message about car tax. Gene deletes it and sticks some cold pizza slices in the microwave, sitting on the sofa while he’s waiting, pen poised over his notebook.

He probably ought to buy another computer, but he thinks better this way, ink in hand, this is how it used to be back when he was still fresh and bright and invincible.

He’s always felt too much, far too much – moments like this, the melancholy sinks into him with a burn that’s almost pleasant. Alcohol deadened those feelings more than replaced them, stopped him caring too much about anything, maybe prevented him – he sees it now – ever really feeling enough about some things he should have valued.

What happened with Tyler has largely spooked him out of his usual evening drinks, and has given him something else to do instead. And although he’s told Tyler so much today, although he’s never been more aware of how far he’s fallen down the shitty hill of life’s disappointments, now he feels alive, he’s aware that he feels - for the first time in a decade – _real_.

\- - -

 _Colin Raims._

 _Lauren Chester. Tina Mitchell._

Each name a life, but here in front of Gene they’re reduced to incident numbers and index keys on triplicate evidence forms, linked only by paper clips.

Like the charts at the end of Tyler’s bed on the Neurosurgical Ward, the run of numbers, the wiggling line of temperature and pulse that describe day after day of a human existence, evidence without meaning, information without the ability to inform. That life of Tyler’s that Gene Hunt barely knows and yet maybe saved, just after almost definitely, almost nearly ending it.

Sam Tyler is the link, whoever Sam Tyler really is. Sam Tyler connects the dots. Sam Tyler makes the reason clear, or could; Sam Tyler makes it all make sense.

 _“I’m not who you think I am, and I don’t think you’re who you think you are either.”_

That was what Tyler had told him, that day on Tactical Driving, during the period when they were still talking rather than snarling, his eyes quick and his tongue sharp, more alive than you could reckon.

Gene wants to finish that conversation, because the more he reads this man’s working out, the more he sees of the man’s mind, the more fascinating it becomes.

\- - -

 **Chapter Five**

\- - -

The next time Gene visits Tyler, there’s already someone in his room.

It’s an older woman carrying a huge boom-box cassette player, the sight of which startles him so much that he doesn’t bolt as instantly as his first instinct tells him to.

She’s grey-haired and wearing a green dress that has none of the shapeless quality he associates with pensioners. Seeing him, she smiles, shrugging helplessly.

“He had this at his Uni, this massive stupid thing.” She laughs, the way people do when they want to cry. “I was going through his old stuff in the garage, I don’t know why I just... I found the old tapes – god, remember tapes? Broke half the time, take up so much space, I don’t know why I let him keep them all but I found them, and I thought he might like it.”

Gene experiences a moment of rare panic, with no idea what to say or what excuses to make, but at that moment the auxiliary nurse with the purple lipstick appears at the door and he’s surprised when the woman asks for two cups of tea. Whilst this is being poured she goes to her bag and brings out some fig rolls and a bunch of grapes, which she places on Tyler’s bedside table, hands trembling slightly.

“It’s stupid, I know, but I just feel like it’s the thing to do. I almost bought Lucozade. I saw the card from the CID – I’m sure he’d appreciate it. Nurse says you work with him.”

She doesn’t introduce herself – he’s unsure if she’s too upset - but Gene already knows this can only be that phenomenon he himself had never really experienced, a mother.

Trying not to think too hard about it, he brings in another chair from the corridor, sits down next to her and waits as the first tape whirs around, Elton John pouring out his heart in a scratchy distant sound that seems so primitive now to ears used to digital.

 _And I think it’s gonna be a long long time / till touchdown brings me round again to find / I’m not the man they think I am at home / oh no, no, no / I’m a rocket man..._

If Tyler hears it, there’s no way of telling, but Gene notices that his eyes are moving again, rapid side-to-side dreaming, seeing goodness knows what.

“It was always just me and Sam, really,” the woman is saying softly. She’s holding Tyler’s hand, leaning over him. “His father left us early days, no kind of person really, no kind of father, though Sam worshipped him. He’s probably out there somewhere still, you know. Caught myself wondering if he’d seen it on the news – about Sam – was still fool enough to wonder if he’d turn up at the door. When I first saw there was someone else in here, I half thought... Not that I’d want him anywhere near Sam, now or then. He won’t be here, though. Too much of a coward.”

She clenches her fist, looking dead ahead at where her son is lying so still and pale. “We come into this world alone and we leave it alone,” she says fiercely. “Why try and change that half-way through your life except to have something to miss?”

Gene’s dealt with a lot of difficult situations during his career, dealt with a lot of relatives in awful times, but this isn’t work and he feels for her with a raw sympathy he hasn’t felt in a very long time. Leaning forward in the chair, he watches her, watches her mouth working with grief and anger, the blazing emotion in her eyes that is reminiscent of her son.

“I said I’m not leaving him,” she continues. “I told him I’m not and I never want to, but they won’t let me visit all hours and I’m looking after my sister, she had a stroke last year, bless her. I have nightmares all the time that he’ll wake up without me here.”

Although he of all people knows how pointless and irritating platitudes can be, Gene can’t stop himself.

“Maybe he knows you’re here now?”

She bites her lip and shakes her head, smiling indulgently. Not a look he often gets directed at him.

“Does it look like it? Sam’s a long way away, love. A long, long way. Probably can’t even feel us reaching. If he could hear me,” she’s struggling not to weep now, voice going thick. “I know if he could hear me call him, he’d come back to me.”

Gene burns with need to help her, but has to rise from his chair and pace away, just to the wall and back, because nothing in life so far has made him very good at expressing gentle emotions.

She doesn’t ask how Gene knows Tyler, or anything else about him, why he’s here, and he finds himself strangely relieved at that, because he doesn’t want to lie, but he can’t imagine any way to tell her the story.

\- - -

Tactical Driving was a mandatory part of being in Traffic, also for all of CID and everyone else who some person in the mystical land of Risk Assessment had deemed likely to ever be in or near a car. Frankly Gene was amazed they didn’t make the German Shepherds take it.

‘Mandatory’ - as in all jobs - had a certain amount of variability, but in this instance it meant what it said on the tin, it was attend the course or get the badge taken off you and Gene had already missed one session.

It had in fact been about two weeks before Rachel’ sudden departure. Gene’s memories of a lot of that time - before and after - were hazy with alcohol and conversations he’d imagined afterwards - all the things he’d wished he’d said (or not said at all). He’d certainly been in a foul mood that day right from the start, bored, tired, desperate for a fag, sitting in a cold hangar on a disused airfield in Kent with a dozen or so other pissed off looking Police Officers, watching a bloke in a high-visibility tabard write _Acceptable Risk_ on a whiteboard and turn, smiling brightly, to ask them what they felt it meant _to them._

In fact, he’d been so intrinsically annoyed that it had taken a good half-hour before he’d even registered that the man he knew as ‘that job-stealing, precocious twat’, DCI Tyler, was even there.

Of course, Tyler had been in the front row of the class, notebook ready, answering the instructor’s questions in a clear, confident voice whilst towards the back, Gene and some of the other older officers sighed, scratched and looked up at the spiders’ webs on the high metal struts of the hangar.

“You. You in the third row in the coat. Gene?” Referring to the class plan they’d had to fill in, the instructor had pointed at him. “What would be your next course of action in this scenario?”

Gene had studied the scribbled diagram on the board for barely a moment.

“I’d go after the bastard.”

The instructor smiled smugly – seemingly, he’d been hoping in this very way to illustrate a point. He turned to the rest of the class.

“Why is that not what we’d advise? Sam?”

“Risk,” Tyler had answered promptly in a superior tone, turning in his wooden chair to look at Gene. “Unacceptable risk of collateral damage.”

Gene didn’t twitch a muscle. “I’d go after him,” he repeated.

“You’d knowingly endanger the lives of members of the public?” Disdain was written clear across Tyler’s face and Gene had glared at him, squaring up for the debate.

Just as things were getting to the point where Gene was ready to push aside the desk in front of him and tell Tyler the old _come-over-here-and-say-that_ , the instructor had clapped his hands and brightly suggested a coffee break over at the tables with the large, incontinent silver urns and the foil trays of fibrous, cheap digestives.

Cup in hand, Gene had wandered outside with two other blokes for a smoke, aware of the heat still under his shirt, of the fact that even before the stimulants could hit his system his heart was pounding.

From the first time he’d heard of Sam Tyler, months earlier, he’d instinctively, inescapably disliked him, but this felt more like hate, this thundering emotion wracking through him, the aftershock of their shared gaze still shaking him.

Refreshments consumed, and Gene breathing more slowly, the class had returned to the rows of seats for all the excitement of covering a potted version of the Highway Code, half an hour of bollocks about ‘unusual vehicles’ and then some indigestibly dry facts about depth perception, peripheral vision and reflex time.

Then there was a video about Risk Assessment.

Gene would have switched off anyway, but he couldn’t seem to stop watching the smug little git two seats ahead and one to the left of him; the way he sat in his chair with limbs still and back straight but at the same time clicking and un-clicking his pen; the way he unconsciously straightened his tie every ten minutes and a ran his fingers back over his hair; the seemingly fixed displeased pout of his mouth; the neat blue string of notes appearing on his pad.

Abruptly, at one point, Tyler looked over his shoulder and back at him and Gene found himself looking away quickly, spooked, before he could stop himself and hold the gaze.

After an interminable period the class was taken outside for the practical exercises in the cars. The first involved driving in various formations on the long disused runway; practising controlled stops, boxing in and simple convoy driving. Between turns, people stood about on the tarmac chatting, sipping tea, but somehow no group seemed eager to absorb DS Hunt or DCI Tyler, certainly not both together, and frequently Gene found that they were both standing alone, probably looking yet more like idiots for not talking to each other.

The instructor looked down at his clipboard: “Alright, next pair – Tyler and Hunt?”

“You’ve got to be fucking joking,” Gene muttered.

But no one else looked keen to swap or intervene.

“Now remember, the driver has to drive,” the instructor was helpfully pointing out. “Front seat passenger, it’s your job to relay info to base and update them, also to anticipate and request clearances for manoeuvres. Your situational awareness needs to extend at all times to the possibility of decamp and you must be poised – in a safe manner, according to your reading of the situation – to be ready to get out and continue pursuit on foot.”

“I’m driving, then,” Gene stated.

Tyler shrugged, raising an eyebrow. “Oh please, be my guest, I don’t feel the need to demonstrate my testosterone levels to the world.”

With Gene gritting his teeth, they had climbed into the marked car, which smelt like the practise cars always did, very strongly of body odour and spilt cola and ill-chosen aftershave. The seats were stuck at awkward distances and the steering wheel was peeling leather and managed despite being intrinsically black to look grimy.

Tyler’s mouth was a moue of disgust, but he was looking at Gene.

“What on Earth did you have for lunch?”

“Chips.”

“They just drowned in the beer then, did they?”

“Are you saying I’m not legal for driving?”

“If I thought that there’s no fucking way I’d let you drive me about.”

Tyler looked rattled too, face flushed. Gene got the impression he didn’t let himself swear very much.

As they set off in the pursuit after the instructor in his ‘stolen’ Vectra, Tyler picked up the radio and began the running commentary. “Left left at the junction... speed now fifty in a thirty zone... continuing along the A road, requesting other cars in the area to undertake a controlled box, air support would be much appreciated.”

“More tea, vicar?” Gene muttered. Tyler was actually being textbook perfect, not missing a thing, which if anything made it more annoying.

Suddenly the Vectra made a sharp right turn and Gene followed with expert precision, gripping the wheel with a pleasing rush of reflexive adrenaline, weaving almost elegantly between the cones that marked the boundaries of the ‘road’.

Tyler’s mouth went wide open with outrage: “Stop! You’re supposed to stop! That’s the whole point, this is a pedestrianised walkway through the local shopping complex! We’ll fail the whole bloody thing now!”

Not trusting himself to respond and manage to steer at the same time, Gene slammed on the brakes, lurching them both forward with a grunt and, once they were still, before Gene could speak, Tyler pushed the door open and leapt from the car, visibly seething.

They had reached the end of the airfield far away from the hangar, near where the tarmac ended and the chipped edges faded into sandy soil and then a boundary of thick woodland and bushes; after the engine had stopped they could hear the raucous alarm of startled crows flying from their perches.

Instantly, not pausing to think, Gene had got out too, pacing around the car and towards Tyler, who turned and looked daggers at him as he advanced, raising his hands to the heavens, not even slightly backing down.

“You’re crazy and you’re going to get me killed! You’re going to get yourself killed!”

Gene kept coming closer and Tyler had kept just not stepping back; a tosser, maybe, a health and safety nut, certainly, but no wimp.

“You tell me sunshine, how do you catch criminals in your land then, eh? Bore them to death? Smother them with paperwork?”

Tyler was right in his face now, shouting. “I follow the rules, alright? You have to follow the rules, you can’t simply...”

Somehow Gene had grabbed two handfuls of Tyler’s jacket. His heart was pounding again and more than anything it felt like fear, because he could be a bit of a brawler, for sure, but he’d never before got like this, never wanted to grab a man and shake him, really get hold of him, get right in there and just...

\- - -

Once, the year Gene had joined the police, when he’d first had the money to take himself far away on a little bed and breakfast holiday in the sun, he’d shagged a bloke.

It hadn’t been the plan. It had most definitely never been in the plan but he’d been drunk, wandered into either the wrong bar or the right one, depending on how you looked at it, and it had been the most intoxicating thing he’d ever done, the most in his own skin he’d ever felt, the simplest pleasure he’d ever found.

Afterwards the feeling, the wanting, the sense-memory of it all, it was like the booze, but he’d found himself more able to resist it because at least with the booze even admitting you wanted it didn’t have to be a lie.

A queer copper in 1983? Not a fucking chance.

He’d met a nice girl and he’d loved her, in one kind of way at least, and he was always almost sure she never knew.

The confession won’t come to his lips even now, even in the stillness of the hospital room, even for the all-absorbing void of Tyler.

“I wasn’t just angry with you,” he says instead, very softly, watching the unseeing eyes. “I mean, get this clear, you’re obviously a knob, but...”

 _Maybe Tyler knew? Did Tyler know? Did Tyler understand what was happening all along? Did he pick up the strange atmosphere, the chemistry between them? If he’d collared him about it, would it have kept on happening?_

\- - -

 **Chapter Six**

\- - -

In the end it’s good old-fashioned knackering, plod-worthy legwork that turns up trumps.

For a few days, Gene has been visiting the dodgiest garages he’s ever encountered, in his civvies, telling a story about his mate’s lost Ford Cavalier, knowing almost all the workers he meets will assume it’s something about drugs and be as likely to tell him as not if he hints at being fairly threatening.

Finally, in a dim workshop that smells of several semi-legal substances, there’s a guy in an overall with a scraggly, oily beard who looks at the picture of the car on Gene’s mobile with a glimmer of recognition.

“Yeah mate, I know that one. Wouldn’t forget. MOT last year. Terrible. Shot to pieces.”

“I’m very glad to hear this, my friend – who brought it in?” Gene’s prepared to bet that the car hasn’t seen an MOT in a decade, but if it had been brought in it might well have been under memorable circumstances – tyres slashed with a knife, drugs left in the boot, that sort of thing.

The guy smiles at him – he’s missing several teeth. “Well that’s what you might call the sixty-four thousand dollar question, innit? Not a clue I’m afraid, mate. We don’t keep all that many records, you know?”

Gene smiles back, grabs him by the collar, pushes him to the wall and just stops shy of pinning him.

“Oh I bet you can remember if you think. And if that doesn’t work, you’d be amazed what techniques they have these days to help with amnesia.”

“OK, chill mate! Alright! Maybe I do remember something...”

Gene walks away with a new name on his list.

 _Kramer._

A few blocks away, back in his car, already on the phone to get things underway on a search of the criminal database, Gene takes another bite of the cheese and ham toastie from the motorway cafe he passed on the way here and necks two ibuprofen; he doesn’t have time to stop for a bit of niggly stomach pain.

\- - -

“What was it about Raims, Tyler?” Gene leans forward in his wipe-clean chair in the wipe-clean room, careful of the stack of paper balanced across his knees on a discarded meal tray.

“You knew something, didn’t you? Your instincts had figured something out, even if you never wrote it down. What the hell was it?”

It’s not David Bowie but it can’t hurt.

There are a lot of Kramers in the Greater Manchester area – if it’s even the right name and the lugworm at the garage wasn’t cleverer than at he looked. No obvious link between any of them and Colin Raims, at least on what Gene’s been able to turn up today, certainly not on any of the ones with previous.

It’s helped that DI Roy’s somehow managed to get him formally seconded to the Raims case, which has been hanging idle since she’s now left it entirely – _conflict of interest_ , she’d told him curtly, not inviting questions. There’s no senior figure directly linked to it so Gene’s just grabbing the bull by the horns and keeping at it, before someone higher still notices and cuts the budget.

“Come on, Tyler,” he murmurs, not even thinking about it now, just asking, asking, asking those unanswerable questions to the void in front of him. He takes a swig of coffee and rubs his hands over his eyes. “Why not answer me, eh?”

Mrs Tyler had told him before she had to leave, an hour previously, that one day when he couldn’t visit the doctors had brought in a hypnotherapist, with results that that were apparently called ‘inconclusive’ – it’s still not entirely clear if Tyler can wake up and if he can, why he isn’t.

Gene’s also met Mrs Tyler’s sister now, a lovely lady called Marjorie who can’t move her legs or left arm anymore but hasn’t let it stop her crocheting like there’s about to be a shortage – she has two children of her own, both with small babies apparently, and when she talks about them Gene notices Tyler’s mother smile and bite her lip at the same time.

“Dammit, Tyler,” he says now, “we’re waiting for you.”

He sinks into the chair, can’t believe himself, still talking to an empty space. “Just listen to me, Sam.”

\- - -

That night, Rachel phones.

“Can’t really speak now, actually,” he tells her, cradling the phone under one ear as he twists the dial on the microwave, casting a glance back at his pile of paper.

She sounds a little softer today – maybe she’s had a rough day or maybe a good one, or just done some thinking.

“You and I never did speak, darling,” she says, sighing. “We didn’t have a relationship, we had a contract and I think you knew that. You didn’t understand me and God knows you wouldn’t let me understand you. What decade do you think we live in? It’s supposed to be about connection. Communicating, talking, telling each other stuff.”

He wonders if she’s slightly drunk – he can’t quite remember how the tone of her voice should be any more. Hearing her down the phone line is disconcerting, like some strange message from some other side, some other reality, an echo of a present that doesn’t exist anymore.

She’s still speaking – he can’t remember ever having had such a long pronouncement from her before. “Sometimes, talking to you, it was like talking to a wall. And I don’t think you ever really talked to me. I could see there was so much inside you, so much feeling just boiling away, eating you from inside. But those walls never came down, not for me.”

Phone still in hand, he rests down on the sofa, taking a deep breath, feeling something like an ache in his chest and instinctively looking for the nearest whisky glass.

“I’m sorry,” he says, after an awkward silence. “I don’t know what else to say.”

She laughs down the phone, light and amused and maybe little sad.

\- - -

On that airfield, that cold day in 2005, the Tactical Driving instructor had pulled Gene away from Tyler, making loud, cheerful comments and suggesting another coffee break before sticking Tyler in his Vectra to go back to the hangar, leaving Gene to drive the practise vehicle back alone.

For the rest of the day they’d been kept well apart, being placed for the other exercises with other, rather palpably unenthusiastic partners.

And yet nothing had seemed real, nothing had imprinted on Gene’s mind of the course after that, only that he’d still been terribly aware of Tyler, and that he kept catching Tyler looking at him, unless maybe it was the other way round.

And this is the thing he always tried not to remember, the thing he never told even to himself, that that night he’d dreamt about him, about Tyler, about Tyler coming at him all fire and intensity, colliding, connecting; about getting his hands on Tyler and Tyler sinking through every last boundary and into him, unstoppable, bright, burning life.

\- - -

 **Chapter Seven**

\- - -

“I’ve let him go,” she’s saying, and Gene can’t help but feel a moment of panic, because it sounds like she’s cut Tyler adrift somehow, like she gave him the permission to just leave them all.

But DI Roy is looking pretty upset herself, turning a file over and over to shake the pages neatly together more times than can be necessary.

“I went and saw him again – not been in weeks, barely ever went, I couldn’t face it, I just felt so...” She grips the file tightly now with her neat, short, unpainted nails and sighs. “I was leaving him, you see, the day it happened. I was leaving him and he wasn’t really caring, and then to go and be the other half and have nurses hug you, it’s just... And if I hadn’t...”

They’re sitting in her cubicle at CID – she’d emailed to ask how things were going and it had wound up as a working lunch meeting, sandwich packaging splayed around her desk and two posh coffees in cardboard cups from the chain near the high-street. Now Gene leans forward in his chair, not sure if he’s sympathetic or furious.

She straightens her shoulders, taking a deep breath. “I don’t think he can hear anything, you know. I think he’s gone, I think they killed him and one day this is going to be a murder inquiry and then you might actually swing some decent resources.” She gives bitter half-laugh. “I went and spoke to him and as I was talking I thought ‘if there’s even half a sign he might hear me, I’ll stop, I owe him that, I’ll promise to stay’ but there was nothing at all.”

It’s a punch in Gene’s gut, but he can’t hit back and he can’t run, not without exposing himself, not without showing his hand far too clearly, and she’d laugh at him, she’d have to, because it’s all so stupid, but if he never says it aloud he doesn’t have to think about that too much.

And she’s upset and she’s a good person, one he admires, even if right now he hates her.

As quickly as he can, he opens the file and starts talking about the post-mortem reports, about nylon fibres and potential ways Raims might have managed to commit the crimes despite the evidence against it; at this point Gene’s all but given up on the Kramer lead, there’s no sense to it and probably the car passed through more hands between whoever that was and the day it hit Tyler.

They have a good discussion; she’s quick to make connections and more importantly recalls Tyler’s reasoning and can read his handwriting.

At the end, though, she’s obviously also still thinking about it.

“Thing is, he wasn’t ever really here,” she says, sitting back on the table, staring ahead of her. “He wouldn’t feel anything when he could rationalise it. He needed to be right, to be validated and approved. I know he never told his mother about me – I think he knew that it wouldn’t last, and that that’s not how he was supposed to behave.”

Gene can’t answer that, and gets up to leave.

“I remember that he talked about you, you know, after that course last year.”

Gene turns, his mouth suddenly dry.

“He said you were insane. Gave me some long diatribe about the purpose of the road user protection directives. I’ve never seen him so worked up about anything.” She fiddles with a pen. “Never seen him so alive.”

“I’ll get those to the recycling bin,” Gene says, inane as fuck so as not to say anything else, picking up the cardboard cups and going to the cubicle exit.

Then he pauses, turning back to her, because a part of his brain is and always will be a policeman’s, not matter what.

“But what did you think?” he asks, slowly.

She sits up in her chair at once, tense again. “What do you mean?”

“You keep telling me what Tyler thought, what Tyler was pursuing. And then this lecture about how repressed he was. So what did _you_ think? What hunch were you following up, the day it all happened?”

She’s already shaking her head. “It was a bad call, bad idea...”

He’s coming back towards her now, some sixth sense blaring like a siren in his mind. Funny how guilt affects different people different ways.

“Look, even if you feel you owe him not to prove him wrong - which you bloody well don’t - you owe a heck of a lot more to these women.”

Gazing up at him, she sighs, and he sits down again, drawing closer.

“I just thought,” she says slowly, wearily, pressing her fingers to the bridge of her nose. “That maybe there might be someone Raims was trying to impress...”

\- - -

In the end, as with just about every murder case not dreamed up for television, the solution – once seen – seems stupidly simple.

Gene stands next to DI Roy; both of them under his umbrella in a pouring spring shower, watching two houses get stripped to the brick by forensics.

Colin Raims and Kramer have lived next door to each other for years, since Raims was a little boy. And maybe if it hadn’t been for that impact Raims would have been just another growling, unhappy adult, but as it turned out he grew up worshipping a man who used him like a hunter uses a dog, to pick up and retrieve his prey, all in the hope of one kind word and a pat on the back.

Was Raims ever actually present when the killings took place? Was he active in them? There’s going to be a long messy court case over that one, Gene can already predict. For his own gut, he doesn’t think Tyler had it all that wrong; Raims is almost certainly going to turn out to be a killer, somewhere along the evidence road.

What they’ve now managed to conclude - with the aid of the CCTV at the corner shop on Kramer and Raims’ road - is that on the day of Raims’ interrogation, Kramer had waited outside the police station and then followed Tyler when he’d left, ultimately to run him down though whether that was a plan or just an impulse still isn’t clear.

“He wouldn’t have been interested in following DI Roy,” the police psychologist had pronounced, looking at Gene and Maya as if she felt sorry they couldn’t help being as thick as they were. “These are two men who view women as objects, as decoration, as a threat to – if anything - their libido, not to their intelligence.”

Unlike Raims’ unprepossessing quarters, Kramer’s house has a goldmine of evidence inside it and things are taking a long while; as the officers work through it, taking photographs, swabbing surfaces, making dark jokes the way you have to, sometimes, Gene stays standing outside with Maya, watching her look from one house to the next through the veil of water running off the umbrella.

“One door away,” she’s saying softly, shivering. “One door away and we would have had him and Sam would be safe.”

“Why never tell him your theory?” Gene asks softly. “Why not till the day it happened? Because it’s obvious you’d had it for a while.”

She looks him square in the eye, not challenging the deduction. “We talked about it together, at our flat. We talked a lot about work at our flat. He discouraged it – well, we didn’t know Raims would have an alibi then – but he certainly didn’t want that to be the right answer.”

“Why not?”

“Because I thought it wasn’t Raims alone just because it didn’t feel right. Just like I didn’t think Sam and I would work because it felt wrong. He wanted to build his little house of evidence.”  Leaving the safety of the umbrella she walks along the street a few steps, arms folded, and he follows her to the car, where she opens a door and sits in the driving seat before continuing. “Sam wasn’t like you and me. He thought he could make sense of the universe and it would obey, you know?”

“He ran after you, though, didn’t he?” Gene is leaning into the gap between door and car roof, a detail coming to him all of a sudden that he’d barely noticed at the time – that when he’d found Tyler, his face had been streaked with tears. “Even though if you’d really been abducted there would have been nothing he could have done, he came anyway.”

She sits back in her seat, raising a hand to her mouth, and he can’t quite figure out what emotion she’s concealing from him. Then the moment passes and she’s looking up at him, calm, smiling a little. “I’m sick of the rain. Want a lift back to the station?”

 _Not like you and me..._

There’s a choice opening before him, Gene realises, still leaning on the car, looking down at her. You set out on one path in life and it bloody well leads anywhere but where it looks to be going, and suddenly there it is, a place you never expected.

“Thanks,” he says now, slowly. “But I want to go to St James’. Tell Tyler we caught the bastard. Just in case...”

She takes a long look at him, confused. Then shrugs, face clean of emotion and reaches to get the door; he leaps quickly out of the way.

She waves through the window at him, and then disappears down the road.

\- - -

“Ready to crack open the champagne?” Gene strides to Tyler’s bedside, kneeling beside him, not bothering to fetch a chair, aware that he’s grinning and holding onto Tyler’s hand. “We’ve only gone and bloody well solved it!”

On the taxi ride over, leaving the crime scenes further and further behind, his mood has risen, gradually realising what he and Roy have truly achieved; justice not just for Tyler but for so many murdered women. For the first time in what feels like forever, his existence seems to have done some good in the world; it’s a nice feeling.

He stays there a while, still holding Tyler’s hand, watching the man sleep, until eventually his heart rate slows and his knees start to ache and he draws back, going out to retrieve a chair and getting some water on the way for his painkillers.

For a long while he sits by Tyler’s bed, explaining what’s happened slowly and carefully, giving all the detail he’s sure Tyler would find interesting and important.

It’s funny, although he knew, really, that Tyler couldn’t possibly respond to what’s happened, he’s realising now that he’d half-expected it to be like a computer game, like once he’d figured out how Tyler had come to be in this coma he’d wake up again. Just like fucking sleeping beauty except in that case...

That case was not like this one.

He could leave, he knows. He could go back to the station and write the stack of paper-work he’s going to have to, sooner or later. Call Maya Roy, even suggest a drink maybe. Go home, get some food down. All the sensible things, all the stupid things he could be doing right now; he’s a sorry, sodding idiot, sat here with a man who isn’t here himself.

There’s no reason for him to stay. But who says anything has a fucking reason?

Drawing his chair closer, taking a deep breath, he keeps on talking.

\- - -

 **Chapter Eight**

\- - -

A month after the raid on Kramer’s house, Gene finds himself lying on the upstairs landing for the first time since the day of Tyler’s accident, once more staring the sky, stars looking clearer now, probably because he hasn’t had a drink in days; to do so would seem too much like admitting how hopeless he feels.

 _Is Tyler somewhere out there? Up there? Where is Tyler right now?_

He’s run too many times through his litany of missed moments, of the almost-nearly, of the nearly-almost. There are only so many times he can see the scenes – the driving course, the odd corridor passing, the times he saw Tyler in a room and purposely didn’t enter, all the times he avoided contact – before they fade with handling, changing to fit old prejudices and new wishes together, or worse still becoming fantasies of what might have been.

He’s even run it all the way back to Carruthers now, to the 90s and his own demotion. If that hadn’t happened, he’d still be DCI and Tyler – what of Tyler? Tyler might be his DI, Tyler might be working with him, no accidents, no arguments, no stolen jobs.

 _What would they be like, together?_

 _What the fuck will he do, if Tyler doesn’t wake up?_

It’s like a pain in the centre of his chest, pinioning him down, this feeling.

When his mobile rings he sits up, twisting rapidly to reach his jacket, and suddenly realises it’s no poetic simile but a real pain, lancing through him sharp and burning, making him want to double up.

His own discomfort, however, doesn’t merit any of his attention; the mobile is displaying the St James’ Hospital number, Hyde Ward extension.

“Hello?” he almost barks into the phone.

Annie Cartwright’s voice answers him. “Gene Hunt? Would you be able to come to the hospital as soon as possible? I’ve been asked to contact you by a Mrs Tyler.”

“Why? What’s fucking happening?”

“I can’t tell you over the phone I’m afraid, sir, but if you’ll just come down we can tell you. I’d recommend you don’t drive if you’re feeling agitated, sir.”

Gene hangs up, already grabbing his car keys, fear pushing the still-screaming pain to the back of his mind as he runs down the stairs.

\- - -

“She wanted you to come and be here,” Annie is saying, leading him through the swing doors with a brisk step. “Mrs Tyler, I mean. He’s had a surgery today and they think he might...”

The pain in Gene’s stomach rises, acid in his craw and a foul taste, the most foul he’s ever known.

“We need to hurry,” she’s saying, turning impatient as he stops, light-headed, unable to feel his feet.

Then he’s aware, only just aware of her cry for help as he coughs and – to his amazement, though it feels distant, fuzzy somehow – blood spills out of his mouth, all over him right there as lies – _when did he fall?_ – as he lies on the wipe-clean floor, under the lights, and finally there are tears in his eyes but he can still see it, the unreachable other end of the corridor, the door of Tyler’s room.

Agony rips through his chest and everything goes black.

\- - -

Uncertain time, uncertain where he is.

There’s a mess of lights and voices, people in green scrubs shouting at each other.

Sharp needles. An awful taste in his mouth. He calls for a drink but no one brings anything, tries to lash out and get free and they push him down, a hundred gentle, firm hands.

He’s on a trolley, something hard anyway, something with wheels. It’s cold, he feels much too cold.

More needles, they’re sticking something into his mouth, choking him; he bites down, fights back and there’s another scratch, waves of pain, and then he’s asleep.

\- - -

“You had a bleeding ulcer,” the tall, thin doctor is explaining rather didactically from the end of the bed, running his finger down a page in a folder of notes. “Were you getting heartburn at all previous to this?”

 _It was a fucking cinder, mate,_ Gene wants to say, but just nods, pushing his head back on the cool pillow, aware of the cannulas in both arms, the transfusion bracelets on his wrists showing just how much they had to pour back into him to keep him alive. He feels half-sick, floating.

“You were very lucky actually,” the doctor continues. “Half an inch to the side and it would have been on a far more major vessel.” He pauses to let his words sink in. “We did an endoscopy and were able to give the ulcers an adrenaline injection to stop the bleeding, but there are also more widespread changes down there called oesophagitis, which will need some long term medications to get rid of. And we need to talk about your drinking patterns – your liver tests aren’t all they might be.”

Gene holds up a hand. “I know, give me the leaflet, I’ll sort it out – look, would you be able to find out for me...” He doesn’t want to say it, doesn’t want to hear it being real, but he has to know. “Look, could you tell if this patient who was on the neurosurgical unit – Hyde Ward – a man called Sam Tyler – can you tell me how he died?”

The doctor raises an eyebrow. “Are you a relation?”

“No.”

“I’ll have to speak to a relative of the patient involved to see if I can disclose information, but if they’re OK I don’t see why not. I’ll get back to you.”

It’s several long, horrible, strangely numb hours before he does come back, new sheaves of paper in his hands; he’s scribbling on one of them but digs through the pile for another, much-folded, as he approaches Gene.

“Sam Tyler was the name you were interested in? I’ve spoken to his mother and she’s given me full permission to speak to you. I have to tell you, I don’t know how you got that message but it’s not what you think. Sam Tyler’s alive. He woke up from his coma two days ago, the day you came in, in fact.”

For a moment, Gene can barely breathe. For a hideous moment he thinks he might pass out again.

“Well then, when can I go and see him?” he hears himself say, before he’s even processed the news. “Can they wheel me up?”

The doctor frowns. “We prefer GI bleeds not to leave the ward, but in any case he was actually discharged yesterday. As will you be, if you get through another twenty-four hours with a stable haemoglobin.” With a wag of his finger, the doctor turns to leave, and Gene looks for something to throw at him.

\- - -

As promised, they do discharge Gene the next day.

He gets a taxi home and finds himself standing in the hallway just staring at the pile of pizza flyers that have accumulated during his inpatient stay, and then around at the rest of his house, as if he’s never seen it before.

Since they cracked the Raims case the place hasn’t been strewn with files, so he ought to be used to it, but for some reason the clear surfaces look emptier now. To have something to do, he washes the few used plates in the sink, slots the packages of pills the hospital gave him into one of the kitchen cupboards, and then drowns a teabag in boiling water before he realises the milk is off. He goes to slump on the sofa, clicking on the TV out of habit.

 _What were you fucking expecting, you pillock? Were you expecting him to thank you?_

He feels like he’s the one that’s woken up to face the day, the one’s that come crashing into reality, and he remembers what his reality was, really.

It occurs to him in a roundabout way – he hadn’t meant to let his thoughts take that path – that he still has no idea where Tyler lives, even if he had any idea what he might say to him.

\- - -

After a week of sick leave and his own company, Gene’s desperate to be back at work, but when he does return he finds that it passes him by in the same meaningless grey daze as everything else.

He’s back on the standard Traffic duties for now - although his Super has said some meaningful things about ‘excellent work’ and ‘future role’ – and every now and again he finds himself, stuck in the middle of routine cautions and tickets, suddenly uncertain. One day he has to go to St James’ Casualty to see a victim in a Road Traffic Collision and take a statement, and just walking through the car park makes him feel strangely like he’s stepped into one of his own dreams.

One evening his phone rings and he feels something shakily unpleasant that he’s ashamed to think afterwards is probably hope, but it’s Rachel, who’s heard about him from someone, probably a neighbour, concerned and for once able to have a chat without bringing up the past. He talks to her for as long as she seems to want, but can hear himself barely saying anything, just encouraging her words with the odd grunt of acquiescence.

He’s heard that Tyler’s also back at the job – has been for a while. The old jokes have rolled out about Tyler’s workaholic tendencies, a lot of relieved affection behind them.  To Gene it seems far too soon, but then what the fuck does he know about recovering from a coma?

Tyler’s based in a different part of the building and Gene isn’t sure if –when he absolutely has to go over to it – he’s walking so slowly because he’s afraid to bump into him or eager to.

One day he’s almost sure they pass in the corridor, Tyler looking the other way, texting, but almost certainly him, and by the time Gene’s past the surprise of seeing him actually _walking_ the moment is lost.

He’s not a bloody fourteen year-old girl and this sort of behaviour is utterly ridiculous, he tells himself quite firmly, but on the other hand he knows that for a while, for a long while, ill-advised or otherwise, his life became Sam Tyler.

 And now Sam Tyler is back, and Sam Tyler has gone, and Gene knows some good ways and a few bad ones to stop feeling how he does, but he’s through with trying to numb away his life.

If Tyler wanted to meet him, he’d make contact, Gene thinks, and hears Tyler’s mother’s voice echoing in his head. He misses seeing her too, he finds, more than he would have expected; the sympathetic tilt of her head when he spoke about his work, the way she scolded him about his diet, the simple kindness about her that she’d shone onto him with easy grace.

It’s about three weeks after Gene’s return to work that he gets a call from Maya Roy.

“They’re not playing the old scene contamination card again are they?” he asks at once, ready to start filling in yet another report.

“No, I’ve spoken to the CPS and they’re happy with the case.” Maya’s voice is anxious under her professional tone. “Listen Gene, it’s Sam. I’m worried about him.”

Gene leans forward, pressing the phone to his ear, coldness in his stomach and yet a kind of thrill too, to have a legitimate reason to talk about this.

“In what way?”

“He won’t talk about the accident or the coma at all, not to anyone. I mean... goodness knows I gave up any right to... I’ve not spoken to his Mum but I’ve heard him on the phone with her – I really get the impression he’s not dealt with it at all. I don’t think he’s got all his memory back properly either – sometimes things are coming out... backwards, he said something about his Dad that was just odd.”

Gene closes his eyes; no way to convince himself he doesn’t care, but can he do this to himself again?

“They’ll have stuck him through the post-traumatic Psychologists though, won’t they?”

“He’s doing some kind of report for someone, but I just don’t know, Gene. Like I’ve said, he simply won’t talk about it. I mean we know what happened that day, we know that now thanks to you, so I thought he ought to be able to talk to you if to anyone.”

Gene’s mouth goes dry. “He wants to talk to me?”

There’s a slight pause from the other end of the line, long enough to let him know those hopes weren’t worth raising. “Not as such,” Maya says slowly. “He won’t talk about the accident, like I said. I haven’t even been able to bring up that you were involved, not the investigation, none of it. But maybe what he needs right now isn’t sensitivity.”

“Maya, I don’t know if I’m the right one to...”

She interrupts him: “Hold on a second.” Then with a click on the line she’s back: “Look, I have to take another call, let me know how it goes with him, OK?”

Gene can’t stop himself asking. “So, then, are you two...?”

“No,” she says softly. “It wasn’t right, Gene, I told you that. Maybe even less so now – he’s just gone, I don’t understand it. It’s like he came back but not all of him, somehow, I don’t...” She tails off, then clears her throat. “I really have to go. Call me.”

And Gene’s left staring at the phone, half-way between relief and despair.

\- - -

Simply tracking Tyler down is harder than he’s expecting, the next day at work when he sets aside an hour to do so. He tries Tyler’s office over in the main building on the CID floor, near to Maya, but there’s no one in her cubicle or Tyler’s. He notices that Tyler has no photos in his, no silly executive toys, no free calendars; you’d barely even realise it was usually occupied.

Going back to the main corridor, Gene runs into a smartly-dressed woman with an ID badge identifying her as a CID secretary, who smiles brightly in response to his enquiries.

“DCI Tyler? Oh, he’s just gone up to a meeting on the eighth floor, dear. Listen, if you’re going past the internal mail docket on your way out, could you be an angel and stick this envelope in please? I really need to get to that phone.”

She dashes away at an incredible speed on her high heels and Gene looks down at the object now in his hand, one of the standard internal mail envelopes with multiple destination boxes, the last address crossed off each time by the recipient before being forwarded on with whatever new contents.

On this envelope, the last address scored through was to DCI Sam Tyler.

Before he has time to think that maybe he ought not to, he’s ripping it open, shaking out onto his palm a small dictaphone tape, partly run through. Nothing else, no letter or explanation.

Wandering back to the cubicles, he picks up the nearest dictaphone and rewinds the tape with what seems agonising slowness and then, holding it up to his ear in the almost deserted room, starts listening.

 ‘My name,” says the voice he’d waited so long, so eagerly, to hear, “is Sam Tyler. I had an accident...”

\- - -

 **Chapter Nine**

\- - -

“Where is he?”

Gene’s panting as he lurches into the eighth floor office where the meeting is being held, the lift was taking too long and he’s in no fit state to wait for anything.

Around a long conference table, twelve or so people look up indignantly at him.

“I beg your pardon,” a man at the table head says, “but we’re in the progress of...”

“Where. Is. Sam. Tyler?” Gene steps forward, and fuck it if they want to fire him for this, fuck it if they want his head on a plate, none of that matters now. His gut feels like a lump of ice, his hands are freezing with the rush of fear that crept over him as he listened to Sam’s tape.

 _Back here, nothing seems real._

Sam’s voice on the dictaphone, disembodied, pale and thin as his body had always seemed, as divorced from the world as that empty shell had been. Heavy-sounding, tired. _Despairing._ Waiting for the asteroid to end the whole mess – Gene knows that mood, knows that mood better than any other.

 _I can’t feel anything really. I find that... I miss those people, those... is that common? After a coma? When I was with him – when I was with those people, I didn’t feel alone. But they weren’t real._

The man standing by the whiteboard with ‘Challenges’ written on it is also looking at Gene like he’s mad, but answers slowly all the same.

“He went out, seemed a bit...” He looks round his colleagues as if for consensus, fucking bureaucrats. “Seemed a bit unwell, maybe? Said something about the roof.”

“The _roof_?”

“I guess he wanted to smoke,” the man starts saying but Gene is out and running to the stairs again before the sentence can be finished.

\- - -

“Sam!” Gene cries out, loud as he bloody well can, a desperate shout he seems to have had bottled inside himself for a lifetime.

The sprint up the stairs has left him breathless as hell as he bursts through the metal door onto the police station roof, but he shouts anyway, with every bit of energy he’s got.

At the sound, the slim figure standing within inches of the opposite edge, face turned slightly upwards, twists round like he’s had a bullet fired past him, something like horror on his face.

“No...” Sam is saying, softly, shaking his head. “No, you can’t be.”

Gene’s running again, towards him, and the closer he gets the more he can see how pale Sam still is, even as he tries to process the almost miraculous sight of him standing, moving, talking and actually fucking looking back at him; still some fire in the dark-rimmed eyes.

“No, not here...” Sam’s hitting his head with his palms now, wide-eyed, open mouthed. “Not here, I can’t... You’re either real or you’re not, Gene, please...”

Gene’s moving more slowly now, cautiously, approaching with one hand outstretched like he would a nervous animal. “Sam,” he says again, low. “Sam, listen, I’m here.”

Mustn’t spook him – there’s only one bloody reason Sam would have come up to this roof and the rail around the edge is horribly low.

Sam is breathing more quickly now, chest rising and falling, maybe on the edge of panic, but there’s an anger somewhere underneath it too, Gene can tell, an instinctive irritation that seems to ignite between them no matter how they meet.

“Listen,” Gene says again, stopping now, hand still held out. “Listen to me, Sam. I suppose I should thank you for not telling every last damn one of my secrets to...” he looks at the envelope still crumpled in his hand, “Alex Drake, Clinical Psychologist.”

Sam’s eyes are wide, wary: “What do you mean?”

“Well, you mention Stuart, but not what happened when I found him, and there’s none of my Mum in there and you’ve left my ex-wife out of it entirely except for – for some reason – her taste is music which proves the human brain is a fucking mystery and most of all yours – hope you’re leaving it to medical science. Would have rather you didn’t talk about the backhanders but that’s done now, I stopped, who’s going to believe it was something I told you rather than something your diseased little mind cooked up? Besides, you’ve got my fucking job, what else do you want?”

For a long moment, Sam stares at him, frozen.

Then he takes a deep breath, blinking, squinting at him as if he’s suddenly come into the sunlight.

“DS Hunt?”

Gene has to pause to finally breathe himself. “Yes. DS Hunt. From the Tactical Driving Course? The insane lunatic driver without the risk assessment? The one who bloody well found you on the ground and caught your bloody assailant and Colin Raims if you don’t mind me mentioning it – did you just not care about any of those details when you woke up, you utter idiot?”

“I didn’t want to... someone said something about an officer from Traffic but... and, what, you visited me? Were you the one that... Mum said she didn’t know your name.” Sam shakes his head. There are tears in his eyes. “Everyone keeps saying they’re real and I just can’t...” He gazes into Gene’s eyes, some strange mixture of fear and intense affection that has Gene’s spine tingling. “I thought I left you behind.”

“Sam, dammit! I’m here, OK?”

Gene grabs his hand, pulls him forward, staring into his eyes – if Sam needs to feel something to stay here, then fine, Gene can give him that, because even if it’s hate, this’ll produce _something_.

He kisses him.

It’s too rough to be chaste, too desperate to be romantic, too uncertain to be tender, but it feels like the whole fucking universe between them.

Sam collapses, or Gene does, either way they sink together to the filthy, dusty rooftop, leaning against the rim and each other.

“Gene,” Sam says at last, voice full of wonder. His eyes are wide open and blazing and beautiful.

They’re still holding hands, connected. Sam squeezes down half-experimentally.

Gene leans over and pinches the back of his hand.

“Feel that do you? Fuck me, let’s never do this again.”

“Gene!” Sam’s smiling, still gripping on. It’s a mess, it’s clearly going to be a mess for a while but here they are, in the sunshine, together and maybe things happen for a reason and maybe they don’t, but this is what happened.

They’re together now. Close. Only inches away.

Gene Hunt tilts his head back in the sunshine and laughs with delight, and breathes, and feels utterly and completely and brilliantly alive.

\- - -

 


End file.
